‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma,’ ‘Unbroken’ and More, Adapted for Young Readers

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The Olympic runner Louis Zamperini, the subject of “Unbroken,” sets a record in 1939.CreditPaul Wagner/Associated Press

By Nina Burleigh

May 18, 2016

I still remember reading books to my own kids, teenagers now, but I don’t remember the last time someone read me a book, or even a paragraph, other than my husband barking out a snippet of the day’s outrageous news. Yet I’ve never forgotten how different the experience of listening to prose is from reading or watching it transformed into film. It requires time and a mental stillness, the kind one has these days mainly in cars or other modes of transit. And so I set out to listen to the audio of young readers’ versions of best-selling nonfiction in the car on trips upstate, often with my 13-year-old along to test their Y.A. appeal.

We began with Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” read by the actor Macleod Andrews in a vaguely Midwestern, boyish cadence. I was one of those people who had avoided Pollan’s book when it came out a decade back, certain that if I read it, I’d wake up not just rejecting high-fructose corn syrup but also unable to find sustenance anywhere in my country, or worse, morphed into an organic-baby-food-producing, vegan scold.

Listening to the nightmarish story of American industrial farming — the tragedy of ghost towns in Iowa and the Midwest all given over to “America’s 80-million-acre field of corn,” a plant that Pollan compares to an alien ­invasion — was indeed disturbing. When he buys a steer to chart its journey to becoming meat, you know it won’t end well, but what happens is even worse than you think.

At one point, listening to the unfolding litany of disaster that is America’s food system, the kid in the car opined that my generation “let this happen.” I denied it, of course, but as a native Illinoisan who spent a few summers on chain gangs of teenage corn “de-tassellers” toiling in Cargill’s cross-pollination fields, I suppose I am personally implicated in the fiasco.

Tip: You might want to listen to this seven-and-a-half-hour book (the adult audio clocks in at nearly 16 hours) while on a long drive with your family, but you won’t be able to stop and eat at the fast-food outlets serving the disgusting things Pollan calls “EFLS” — edible foodlike substances constructed with corn and sickly factory-farmed cow or chicken. So pack a picnic basket of organic goodies from the farmers market before setting off.

After Pollan, we popped the marvelous work of ­Laura Hillenbrand into the CD player. The actor Edward ­Herrmann (who died in 2014) reads a shorter, Y.A.-­friendly version of “Unbroken,” the true story of the Olympic runner and P.O.W. Louis Zamperini. Hillenbrand begins with our hero, his plane having gone down in the Pacific, floating on a life raft encircled by sharks. She leaves him there and drifts back to the delinquent boy discovering he was the fastest runner in Torrance, Calif. Before long he is racing the 5,000-meter in the 1936 Olympics and meeting Hitler, then enlisting in the Army Air Corps, crashing, spending a record 47 days on that shark-encircled raft and entering a hellish Japanese P.O.W. camp.

Hillenbrand is a true master of the English language (planes “etch” the sky, sharks “bristle” beneath the raft), and her writerly skill is delivered with a feel for the eras in which the book unfolds by Herrmann’s orotund, World War II radio announcer voice, his accent just slightly out of time. I was so into this story that when I reached home as Zamperini was being shot at by the Japanese, I brought the CD out of the car and hurried it inside with me, to finish listening.

Our third and fourth audiobooks didn’t grip us like the first two. “The Boys in the Boat,” by Daniel James Brown, is about the Depression-era Olympic gold-medal-winning United States rowing team. The five-and-a-half-hour audio of the version adapted for younger readers, read by the actor Mark Bramhall, is heavily veiled by fog and endlessly dripping cold rain as the author paints the Pacific Northwest setting. Marketed as a sort of natural companion to Hillenbrand’s book, it lacks her sharp ear for language, and although it was a best seller, it’s not clear why the world needed another book about how the Americans triumphed over Nazi Germany in the 1936 Olympics. The book is, however, evocative of the incredible hardship Americans endured during the Depression, and it strikes deep emotional chords: Before the first third of the story is over, the hero, Joe Rantz, has been abandoned by his family three times. We learn that he and the other rowers, ­working-class boys all, formed a “mystical bond” in the boat that they never forgot.

Unfortunately, “Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts,” by Susan Cain with Gregory Mone and Erica Moroz, didn’t capture us either. We do have introverts in our household, and Cain explains that “a quiet temperament is a superpower,” which is a nice way to look at it. But there’s a gooey dose of psychobabble here, even presumably simplified for young people in this reworking of the adult book, along with a protest-too-much degree of reassurance that introverts are just as smart and worthy as extroverts. Perhaps there are people out there who don’t already believe that, but we’re not among them.

There is a 24-question test by which the listener can determine what sort of “vert” he or she is, which might not be immediately obvious. I took it and found myself exactly in the middle — a so-called androvert, sort of surprising because I was a shy and bookish teenager. The book is full of tips for more introverted teenagers on how to navigate the noisy world, including finding a few close friends and accepting that “you might not get up in front of a stadium like Taylor Swift.” The most interesting anecdote the self-described introvert Cain shares is that she came to realize that being quiet means people often listen more closely when she speaks. But the book, at least, isn’t helped by its reader, the actress Kathe Mazur. My 13-year-old test-listener observed, “She has a voice that makes me want to go to sleep. You should write that.”

And so I have.

NIna Burleigh is the national politics correspondent at Newsweek magazine and the author of five nonfiction books.